AI Researcher Judea Pearl obtains Turing Award

The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) announced on 15th March that they award Dr. Judea Pearl for “for his work on the partnership between humans and machines, part of what is generally known as artificial intelligence”.

IBM’s Watson project has attracted a lot of attention recently. Although most experts believed AI (Artificial Intelligence) is dead, actually the discipline seems to experience a kind of reincarnation these days.

The ACM explained the contribution of Pearl in this discipline as follows:

Pearl pioneered developments in probabilistic and causal reasoning and their application to a broad range of problems and challenges. He created a computational foundation for processing information under uncertainty, a core problem faced by intelligent systems. He also developed graphical methods and symbolic calculus that enable machines to reason about actions and observations, and to assess cause-effect relationships from empirical findings. His work serves as the standard method for handling uncertainty in computer systems, with applications ranging from medical diagnosis, homeland security and genetic counseling to natural language understanding and mapping gene expression data. His influence extends beyond artificial intelligence and even computer science, to human reasoning and the philosophy of science.

Dr. Pearl is a professor of computer science at UCLA. ACM will present the 2011 A.M. Turing Award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 16, in San Francisco, CA. The 2012 ACM Turing Centenary Celebration takes place on June 15-16, immediately preceding the ACM Awards Banquet.